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Topic: Othodox psychotherapy (Read 1431 times)

I was wondering if any of you have heard of the book called "Orthodox Psychotherapy".

I can't remember the name of the author because I left the book at work, but it is a pretty deep piece of work, but well worth the read. It is written by an Orthodox priest who compares us in Orthodoxy to patients in a hospital. We are sick people needing a cure, and being cured.

Orthodoxy is not simply a religion, but it is truley life!! We are in the process of being cured, according to the book, but some of the terminology and concepts are hard to understand.

He focouses on three points of salvation, so far. first is purification, the second is illumination, the third is deification.

He also talks a lot about the "nous". I am having a hard time understanding this concept. Do any of you have a way of explaining the "nous" to a dumb guy like me??

Thanks

Bagpiper

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Troparion - Tone 1:O Sebastian, spurning the assemblies of the wicked,You gathered the wise martyrs Who with you cast down the enemy; And standing worthily before the throne of God, You gladden those who cry to you:Glory to him who has strengthened you! Glory to him who has granted you a crown!

PS. Nous is your mind or intellect when it is not using reason (or deductive reasoning), to comprehend things but rather intuitively or by means of immediate experience or simple cognition. (The Philokalia Vol. 1). And it continues, "This is the highest faculty of man, through which - provided it is purified - knows God or the inner essences or principles ... of created things by means of direct apprehension or spiritual perception." The nous is also the operative power of the soul which the Holy Scripture refers to as the heart.

(Quoted from: "Themes of the Philokalia: The Nous, Number 2." by Archimandrite Ioannikios Kotsonis)